Mechanical Snowman said:
Yeah but a supervolcano eruption is more likely, right? Even if there was a meteor on a course for Earth I'm pretty sure technology would detect that son'bitch and we could nuke it like in that film. Can't really do anything about a volcano.
I dunno about more likely, and I'm not entirely sure about us being able to detect it. We only scan I think less than 10% of the sky? We've already had numerous reports of near-misses with catastrophic-sized asteroids that we only figured out were near misses AFTER they passed by us.
As for supervolcanoes, people think it's like that picture. That's Mt. St. Helens in... I believe 1980? I'd wiki it, but I'm lazy. I don't believe that qualifies as a supervolcano in the slightest. Yellowstone, as (again, I believe) the world's only known active supervolcano, would be at
minimum 10,000 times stronger.
Let's see if I remember my lessons correctly.
For those of you who are familiar with Yellowstone National Park, know that the grand majority of the park lies within the caldera created by the last time it exploded. The caldera of a volcano is that crater-shaped hole you're used to seeing in the center of a volcano. This one is just so large and wide that we couldn't really tell it was a caldera for a long time. Funny that.
The ashfall from Mt. St. Helens reached from it's origin in Washington state to as far southeast as the border of Wyoming. Yellowstone would cover more than half of the U.S. It's too bad that the resultant release of gases and ash would effectively send us into an ice age for quite some time. Oh, but don't worry, it's very likely the ash in the atmosphere will also make the air unbreathable to us, so we'll suffocate painfully before we can worry about the cold.
Oh, and did I mention that all research points to the fact that the Yellowstone supervolcano erupts pretty much like clockwork every 600,000 years?
It's been 640,000 now since the last one. We're kind of overdue.
As I said, sleep tight kids.
